Practical Analytics by DigiKnow

Custom Variables – Tracking more than just visits

Analytics has come a long way over the past ten years.  We started with simple hits and visits from daily log analysis, then moved on to real-time tagging and more “modern” tracking methods.  Along the way we’ve gained the ability to segment, test various ideas, and filter out the noise from our website data.  Today, we have the ability to add data to website visitor activities to gain another level of insight.

When web analysis started, the only data we had access to was that coming from the web browser stored in server log files.  This included the pages/files requested, computer information and visitor IP address.  Even if the visitor had logged in and we had a complete profile on them, we couldn’t do anything with that data.  Today, thankfully, we can insert these additional data points, such as demographics (age, gender, etc.), preferences (heavy user, light user) or even memberships levels (non-member, basic, premium), into the data stream and use this data in our analysis.

Each analytics package has it’s own way of handling custom variables, both in the number allowed and the code-level configuration.  Below is a video from Google about how to handle this in Google Analytics (fast forward to 11:21 in the video – audio quality is not great).

One custom variable implementation that DigiKnow did that I think is a little outside the box, is using the page-level variable to track 404 (page not found) errors on a website.  This may be a little more technical than I usually get here, but to explain what we did, the line of code in red was added to the 404.html page for the website.  The parameters on the “setCustomVar” call are indicating: slot/key #1, Category of variable, Value for category and that the variable is page-level (3).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1");
pageTracker._setCustomVar(1, "Error", "404", 3);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

What results from this is new content in the Custom Variables section (under Visitors)

More importantly, now I can setup custom report “Pages with 404 Errors” and a segment “Visits with 404 Errors” and see how and why visitors are getting to pages that don’t exist. 

If the technical details here are daunting, don’t worry, there are experts to help with that.  Just knowing that you can bring customer profiles or other custom variables (like the 404 example) into your analytics data should get your mind going about what else you might want to track.

Back to Basics: Segmentation

Although I've made several posts about segmentation, I thought it would be good to take a step back and talk about what segmentation is and why it is one of the most powerful tools in the analytics tool kit.  Segmentation is the ability to look at just a portion of your traffic, based on some criterion such as geography, site action, time of day, or some other custom variable you set.  The power from segmentation (also known as filtering) is by comparing the patterns of one segment of your users versus the activities of another.  Separating out these groups helps you see how each is performing and try to isolate opportunities.

Let me provide a concrete example.  For a client, we are running a banner and paid search campaign to drive traffic to the site.  The campaign traffic currently accounts for less than 5% of the total site traffic, so there aren’t any dramatic changes in the overall site traffic usage patterns.  Knowing that, I wanted to see if despite being low volume, whether the campaign driving high value.  By creating two segments, one for banners and one for paid search, I could see not only the basics of page views, conversion, etc. (available elsewhere in Google Analytics, in this case) but I could also see what specific pages received the most traffic, the city/state where visitors were coming from, and the browser/OS used to access the site.  With this information, I got an idea of the type of visitors coming in from each of the campaigns and can put more money in the right place next month. 

Segments are powerful.  Segments let you slice your site data down to a single user and see what he/she did.  Scary powerful.  But how often do you really need or want to do that.  If you use Google Analytics, within Advanced Segmentation (their name for this), there are several predefined segments: New/Returning Visitors, Paid/Non-Paid Search, Search/Referral/Direct Traffic, Visits with Conversions, Visits from iPhones, Non-Bounce Visits.  These are all great and if you do nothing beyond using these, you are already ahead of many people. 

But of course, I would love everyone to take this further. Here are some other general segments that I would suggest (with links to Google Analytics examples):

• Completed a specific site goal – if you have goals setup in GA (I hope you do!) then you can use the goal as a segmentation point.  If you aren’t using goals, visitors that reach a specific page can be considered a goal.
  • Example: Complete Goal #1 segment
• Mobile visits – For the purposes of segmentation, I consider anything smaller than 640x480 to be mobile.
  • Example: Mobile segment
• Campaign visits (general or specific campaign) – this can be setup using a campaign name, campaign medium or many other dimensions.
  • Example: All campaign traffic segment; Banner campaign traffic segment
• Visits from or excluding a specific geography – this could be visitors specifically in the US or only international visits; maybe visitors from Ohio vs. visitors from Pennsylvania
  • Example: US visits segment; non-US visits segment
• Visits within a time period – knowing what visitors are doing within or outside of business hours can be powerful, especially if your site has a clear pattern of more weekday traffic than weekend.
  • Example: Visits outside of business hours (all days)
• Internal website visits – it is sometimes helpful to know what your own company is doing on your website.  The easiest way to track this is by Service Provider in Google Analytics if your company shows as its own service provider.  If not, this is tricky, but can be done through custom code.
  • Example: DigiKnow internal traffic segment (this is only useful as a model/pattern)

The easiest way to learn how to use segments it to dive right in.  If you use Google Analytics, the examples above will get you started.  Any time you dig into analytics, the best approach is to have a goal in mind.  If you don’t know what you are trying to find out, you can spend a lot of time exploring, but not learn much and won’t find anything actionable.  Rather than try to explain any more here, I wanted to link you to a great video that explains Google Analytics Advanced Segments.

Related Posts About Segmentation 

• Profile-specific Segmentation

• Managing Google Analytics Segments

• Measuring Mobile

Google keeps the new features coming

Google delivered an early Christmas present on Monday announcing some new features that will be coming out soon.  You can read the full text at Google’s Analytics blog, but I wanted to both make you aware and give you my take on the new features.

Annotations

As I said in the comments on Google’s post “Hallelujah”.  Because “why” is such an important part of analytics, being able to record the cause of a spike (or dip) is very important.  Until now, I’ve had to manage that in Excel or in a screenshot with annotations in PowerPoint or Word.  Having those in separate sources meant that as time goes on, my records got messy and it was hard to overlay my info on the GA data.  Annotations fixes that.  You can now go into GA and on the timeline, make a note of what happened that day.  Because we have multiple agencies working together and multiple analysts even within DigiKnow, this is a great feature for sharing knowledge.

Although none of my logins have access to this new feature yet to try it first hand, from the video, I really like how they are handling sharing.  Notes can be public to the profile or private to the user.  For every other GA customization (reports, segments, intelligence) you have to share the information via link to other users, but with this, it’s just there for everyone.  I hope that they roll out this system to those other customizations AND leave in the cross-profile sharing too.

 

Custom Variables in Segments & Custom Reports

While I think annotations are for the masses, custom variables (launched in October) are definitely for the more advanced GA users.  I haven’t really talked about this yet (or played with it), but until recently, you could only have one custom variable per domain.  So for a client that I wanted to track two things, I had to jam it into a single field.  With unlimited custom variables, you can track anything without having to be cautions of “wasting” the variable.  Some great things to track are registered vs. non-registered users, previous purchasers, visitor profiles established through questions/surveys, etc.  This is very powerful stuff.  Having the ability to segment by and report on these data is an obvious next step.

Code Setup Wizard

Google keeps adding features that makes configuration of complicated things simpler, putting me out of a job.  Good.  Although setting up multiple domains, sub-domains, etc. is definitely an art, I’m all for a wizard that just makes it happen.  There are parts of analytics that should and do require deep thought, but configuration shouldn’t be one of them.  Just like the GA URL Builder (for tracking campaigns), having a form or system to make setup easier saves time that can be better spend on more meaningful tasks.

 

There is also an announcement coming this week about API updates.  Probably to give access to these new data points.  I’ll update this post with a link to it when the announcement is made, but I don’t think any of you will probably be lining up at the Googleplex to hear that announcement.

UPDATE: Here’s the link to the Google Analytics API updates.

 

So what’s still missing?  We’ll plenty could be added, but the one simple thing that I’m dying for them to add is an import/export or sharing feature for Filters.  Given that we are now able to share custom reports, custom insights and advanced segments, it seems like only a matter of time. 

Google Analytics – Profile-specific Segmentation

From what I can tell, as of today, Google Analytics has added a new feature to Advanced Segments that allows users to associate individual segments with specific profiles.  In the past I’ve talked about my scheme of naming profiles as generic or as client specific, but this eliminates that need completely.

I must say that I have been waiting for this feature for quite a while and I was thrilled when it “appeared” for me today. 

Google has provided the ability to hide your existing segments from current profiles and whenever you add a new profile, you have the option to add it to multiple profiles. 

While this improvement is great for those of us running multiple profiles (or even multiple analytics accounts), the best feature of this upgrade is the Share feature for each segment.  When you click the “Share” link, it provides you a URL that when clicked automatically creates the segment in a new Google Analytics account.  This is great for sharing segments between co-workers or with clients.  It would be great if there was a true synchronization of segments (in case there are edits), but now I’m just being greedy.

Nice job Google. 

Measuring Mobile

Two of my favorite aspects of the web world today are analytics (if you hadn’t guessed) and mobile.  So what better thing to do than talk about them both together!  If you aren’t thinking about mobile for your company or your clients, it’s time to start thinking about it.  If you need some compelling data, you can check out my latest mobile marketing presentation on SlideShare.

The first question I get is “Do I need a mobile website?”  And of course as a good analytics guy, my answer is “Let’s look at the data.”  There are several ways to look at the amount of mobile visitors you get on your website.  The easiest is way to see your mobile traffic is to look at the web browsers and/or operating systems used to access your website.  Almost all analytics packages will show you this basic data about your visitors. 

Using the raw browser usage data isn’t super accurate, since 1) it doesn’t easily group all mobile browsers and 2) it includes all visitors, including repeat visitors.  Here’s how I get around this in Google Analytics.

1. Setup a segment in to look for all mobile devices.  I find looking at any device that has a screen smaller than 640 pixels wide is a good measure. 

Setup: Screen Resolution less thank 640

Update: Now that GA updated their segment management, this URL will let you grab my mobile segment – Mobile (Small Screen)

2. Look at the mobile segment as a percentage of new visits, rather than total visits.  Since you don’t have a mobile-friendly site yet, I always assume that people don’t come back as returning visits from their mobile device.  The new visitor data is under Visitors, then New vs. Returning.  With All Visitors and the Mobile segment active, you’ll see the mobile new visitors number as a percentage of total website visits. 

 

 

The real question here is what is a high percentage of mobile visitors?  From my experience mobile, new visitors range from 0.30% up to 2.0% for my clients.  Now that doesn’t compare at all to something like ESPN where they have said that on some weekends they get up to 50% of their traffic from mobile, but let’s face it, we aren’t ESPN.

If over 1% of your new visitor traffic is from mobile, you might want to start considering that audience. 

 

Technorati Tags: mobile,segment,google,smart phone

Where are my users? Insights from Geographic Web Analysis

So where are your users?  Probably from all over the world.  Even thought it’s 2009 and DigiKnow has an office in Argentina, I’m somehow still amazed at the random visitors that stumble onto the websites I’m analyzing.  So far this month, digiknow.com has had visitors from 43 countries (year to date it’s 90!).  Amazing.

Despite living in a global economy and an ever shrinking planet, we often forget about those visitors that come to our site who can’t buy our products, can’t participate in contest or can’t read the language of our site’s content. 

Step one is to know who is coming to your site.  Almost all analytics packages offer some kind of geographic report or map overlay.  Check it out for your site and see what you can find.

Step two is to determine what, if anything, to do with this data.  While there is no hard and fast rule, I can provide a few examples of how we’ve handled this.

One of our clients launched a product in a limited test market and we found through analytics that 20-25% of the visitors coming to the site did not live within the test market.  This meant that while they could visit the site and become engaged with the product, they couldn’t buy it yet in their state.  Since we knew this would somewhat be the case, at the initial launch, we added a screening page that asked for a zip code and alerted those not in the test market that the product was currently regional.  Because of the high percentage of “outside” visitors, we are now adding a way for them to sign-up to be notified when the product is available.  Had there only been a handful of people from outside our test market, we wouldn’t have bothered, but analytics showed us that they were a modest sized group AND they were very engaged in the website.

In another case, our client was offering a printed booklet sent by mail to US customers.  Since mailed booklet was only available in the US (and for instant access for everyone), a PDF version was also on the site.  We made the assumption that because the booklet wouldn’t be mailed internationally, the PDF would have a higher rate of download for internationals than for US visitors.  After looking at the analytics, we found that the percentage of international downloads was the same as the percentage of overall site traffic, so the PDF wasn’t overly downloaded by those outside the US.

In both of these cases, we made one assumption and found something else in the data.  Making assumptions is part of the business, but using analytics to determine the truth may allow for in-process changes or at least will inform future decisions.

 

Technorati Tags: segment,global,international,geographic

Managing Google Analytics Segments

It’s hard to believe, but it has been nine moths since Google launched their Advanced Segment feature within Google Analytics.  To me, this was the feature that finally propelled Google Analytics into a real competitor with for-pay analytics services.   Until that fateful day in November 2008, I was a huge advocate of ClickTracks because it was reasonably priced, offered log-based and JavaScript tag-based data collection, and most importantly, allowed for great segmentation of the actions on the site.

For those not familiar with segmentation, in web analytics, this generally refers to the process of looking at a slice of your web traffic based on some filter.  You might want to only want to look at visitors from one country, or only look at visitors that visit during a certain time of day or filtering by a cookie that you set on the visitors browser.  Segmentation is one of the biggest evolutions in analytics in the last five years.  (I’ll write more about this in my “back to basics” series in a few weeks.)

One of the drawbacks of the segments that you can create in Google Analytics is that all segments are associated to a username/login.  There are two problems there 1) I can’t easily share them with others and 2) if I write a custom segment for one profile, it shows up on other profiles where it is not relevant.

I don’t have a good way to address my first issue, but I wanted to share my workaround for the second.  Because DigiKnow provides analytics support to a large number of our clients, we have access to many domains and profiles.  To avoid confusion about which segments go with which which profiles, I keep them organized by generic segments (like ‘Mobile’ or ‘DigiKnow Internal’ in the screen shot above) and profile specific segments (like ‘Traffic from OH schools’ or ‘PSC traffic’).  If the segments are client or profile specific, I add initials in front of the (BNB, VBB, DK) to indicate which profile it goes with.  I know it seems simple, but when you have more than 10 segments, you forget which one does what. 

If you aren’t using segments, regardless of your analytics package, think about it.  If you need some guidance, please email me and I will be happy to help.

 

Technorati Tags: google analytics,segment